Numara FootPrints
Customer Case Study
Perini Corporation Utilizes the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service to Provide Service and Support to More Than 1,000 Employees Located Around the World
Founded 110 years ago as a civil works contractor, Perini Corporation is known today for its hospitality and gaming construction projects, and building expertise serving the corrections, health care, sports, entertainment, and educational markets. A publicly traded company, Perini provides all phases of contracting, ranging from design/build services to construction management. Its clients include numerous private companies and public agencies.
Perini is one of the most successful contractors in the US, consistently reporting annual revenues in excess of $1 billion. Headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts, the company is involved in construction jobs throughout the US, as well as select locations around the world. Some of Perini’s projects include casino work in Las Vegas, Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey, as well as jobs in Afghanistan and Kuwait.
The Challenge
With its headquarters in Massachusetts, four main offices located across the US (New York, Florida, Phoenix, and Las Vegas), and hundreds of job sites positioned throughout the world, Perini needed a system that could centralize service and support requests that are submitted from the company’s 1,000-plus employees. In the past, Perini’s IT department manually tracked and managed service requests received by employees via phone or email. This process was very time-consuming and made it extremely difficult for the IT department’s agents to effectively manage the influx of service requests. Perini needed a centralized tracking system to aggregate all inbound requests and manage them throughout the problem resolution lifecycle – ensuring timely service levels.
In addition, with the manual system, the possibility existed for multiple agents to work on the same technical request. This situation occurred when employees tried to re-submit “unanswered” service requests, making repeat inquiries to the IT department. The agents did not have an easy way to identify who was working on which tasks, as they did not have a centralized system in place that everyone could access. This created confusion for employees and agents and ultimately impeded productivity and service level performance. To counter this challenge, Perini sought a centralized service desk system where all issues and requests could be entered into a single repository, enabling the IT administrator to assign issues to agents, and enabling agents to view the status of each issue. Having a central system would also help Perini create a central knowledge base for agents to share information and solutions.
The Choice
In April 2004, Perini decided to automate its IT department, as well as the process they used to track and manage service requests. The company evaluated a few systems and ultimately selected Numara FootPrints® Hosting Service – a solution for organizations of all sizes who want to centrally manage and automate their customer support, help desk, or other request-driven processes, but wish to eliminate the need to manage the IT infrastructure or use staff resources for administration. Although Perini was not necessarily searching for a hosted solution, they realized the inherent business value and cost-savings affiliated with not having to purchase and manage IT infrastructure, such as servers and databases.
The Numara FootPrints Hosting Service offered Perini the same level of functionality and signature ease-of-use offered with the licensed version of Numara FootPrints software, but without the associated costs of managing the IT infrastructure when the software is run on an organization’s web server, database, etc. After an initial test of the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service, Perini’s IT department was confident that it was the right solution. The product’s flexibility, low cost of ownership, 100% web-based functionality, and ability to be continuously customized without requiring any programming were the key criteria for the decision.
“In the past, we may have gathered information related to service requests on paper, but did not capture them within a structured process or system,” explained Carol Fitzgerald, Applications Support Analyst at Perini Corporation. “With the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service, we now have a centralized system in place to ensure issues do not fall through the cracks, and that agents are assigned to specific tasks. This is important to us since we support more than 1,000 end-users geographically dispersed across multiple offices and hundreds of project sites in the US and around the world.”
With Numara FootPrints, PartnerSolve is able to customize its services to the individual needs of each client. This enables the company to create and support various on-going projects, assigning each its own data fields, screens, and custom knowledge bases. This flexibility allows PartnerSolve to launch numerous client-specific service desks.
In June 2004, within days of selecting the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service, Perini launched its service desk and fully customized the system to capture a broad range of standard information, such as problem type, employee location, etc. The company selected 12 members of its IT department to be the agents who would primarily work with the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service.
The Solution
The Numara FootPrints Hosting Service is a 100% web-based service desk solution that includes built-in centralized issue tracking, self-service online, knowledge management, two-way email management, service level management, and comprehensive reporting capabilities – all delivered within a hosted platform where the IT infrastructure is hosted and managed by Numara Software. It provides an ideal solution for organizations of any size to centrally manage and automate help desk, customer service, and other request-driven processes without the cost of purchasing and maintaining the respective IT infrastructure.
By deploying the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service, Perini now has the capability to centrally manage all employee service requests from multiple channels including phone, email, the Internet, live chat, and/or wireless devices.
According to Perini, one important feature of the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service is its ability to set up multiple, partitioned projects with different interfaces, fields, and databases – at no additional charge. Since implementing the hosted service desk, Perini has set up a total of eight projects that track different facets of employee support, as well as other processes. Some of these include a:
- PC services project, in which hardware and software requests are submitted, as well as requests to access certain applications
- Help desk project for telephone and email problems, or issues related to password resets
- Command center project to track software releases, license renewals, hardware upgrades, office wiring projects, etc.
- Software change management project to keep track of financial applications;
- Contracts management project to keep track of any contract Perini has in place with vendors, or to keep track of how many licenses were purchased from a particular vendor.
Perini also configured the system with a special project to capture IT inventory for change management purposes. “We basically went in and populated this project with all of our users,” explained Ms. Fitzgerald. “It is here that we keep track of what applications employees have access to, whether or not they have an email account, what network resources they are authorized to use, etc. This way, if an employee is terminated, we just have one place to go to find out what needs to be removed from the system.”
The flexibility and easy customization capabilities of the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service were key factors in Perini’s choice to select Numaras’ web-based service desk product. Each of Perini’s eight projects are customized to have their own unique look and feel. For example, for service requests, Perini has customized the project to include the user’s contact information, as well as fields that need to be filled in. These fields include, “request type” (hardware, software, service issue, or termination); “item” (if the user selects hardware their choices will be file servers, keyboard, monitor, etc.); and “authorization” (this includes a drop down list of the people who are authorized to request service).
As a central repository that captures all service requests, agents can easily log in to the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service and access their specific assignments, plus they can access the knowledge base to search for solutions and publish information to be shared among the team. “I like the fact that with the Numara FootPrints Hosting Service I can login and see every project that I am working on,” explained Ms. Fitzgerald. “Now, when someone calls into the help desk, I can use the search function within the system to see if a similar problem has been resolved in the past.”
Through Numara FootPrints, Perini was also able to standardize its processes which, as a public company, are especially useful for compliance purposes. “If our company is audited, we are able to provide a list of new hires and those who have been terminated without having to dig through paperwork,” stated Ms. Fitzgerald. “All of the information is readily available, right in front of me, in one centrally managed location.”
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